“We have a credit card culture.”
A CIO said that to us on a call, and it has stuck with us since. He wasn’t confessing to anything or blaming his team. He was describing, accurately and without drama, how his company buys things. We hear some version of it constantly — it’s the most common problem companies describe to us before we ever look at a dollar of their data.
How a company ends up here
Nobody sets out to build a credit card culture. It gets built one reasonable decision at a time. A location needs a part today, not next Thursday, so somebody gets a card. It works, so the next location gets one too. A few years and a few acquisitions later, buying authority sits with dozens of people — all doing exactly what the company asked them to do: solve the problem in front of them.
The result is a company that is genuinely good at getting things and has no idea what it is paying for them.
One buyer described it to us this way: “the branches have taken it upon themselves to go out and procure items that they need — maybe for their jobs, we hope for their jobs, but maybe not.” Another was blunter about the same situation: “we really don’t have a centralized procurement currently.”
What it actually looks like
It almost never looks like fraud, and it almost never looks like one big line item. It looks like this:
- The same item, different prices. Four locations, four prices — sometimes four different suppliers — for something identical. Nobody compared, because nobody was in a position to compare.
- Controls that exist on paper. A plant facilities lead once told us, “the system is not locked.” The approval threshold was real. The enforcement was convention.
- A favorite online retailer. One leader said, with a laugh, that a big online marketplace “loves us because of our ordering.” That single sentence tells you more about spend control than a report would.
- Rogue spending. That’s a buyer’s phrase, not ours. We think it’s sharper than “contract leakage,” and it’s more honest about how it feels from the inside.
Why this is worth looking at right now
Two data points from this year are worth putting side by side.
Procurify’s 2026 Procurement Benchmark and KPIs Report — 700+ organizations across seven industries, more than $30 billion in anonymized spend — found that nearly 77% of transactions now flow through purchase orders, up from about 72% in 2023. Guided buying channels carried more than 61% of orders. Companies really are pulling spend into visible channels, and that is good news.
Now flip the same number over. Roughly a quarter of transactions still aren’t flowing through a PO. In our experience, that is where card spend lives.
At the same time, The Hackett Group‘s 2026 Procurement Agenda and Key Issues Study projects that procurement workloads will rise 8% this year while headcount and operating budgets decline. More buying to watch, fewer people to watch it.
Even the marketplaces have noticed. When Amazon Business rolled out spend anomaly monitoring to flag unusual or non-compliant purchases, the trade press framed the launch plainly: procurement teams are turning to automation to control decentralized spending. Companies are not imagining this problem.
“But we already did a cost-cutting push”
We hear this a lot, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales response. One administrator described their own prior effort to us as “a Herculean effort” — and it was. Companies that have been through one are usually right that the obvious money is gone. Here’s what tends to survive that kind of push. A cost-cutting initiative goes where the dollars are concentrated: the big contracts, the renewals with a date on them, the line items somebody already owns. What it rarely reaches is the spend nobody owns — thousands of small transactions spread across dozens of people, none of them individually big enough to land on anyone’s list. That isn’t a knock on the last effort. It’s that nobody had the category depth or the time to chase a thousand small things at once.
The word buyers use is “control,” not “reduce”
This is the part we’d ask you to sit with, because it changes what a good solution looks like.
When people describe this problem to us, they almost never lead with price. One put it simply: “it’s terribly difficult to control the procurement.” Control. The problem is ownership — not whether a purchase came in three percent high. Which means the first deliverable isn’t a negotiation. It’s a picture: what was bought, by whom, from where, at what price, and how often. Once that picture exists, the savings conversation gets easy, because the numbers argue for themselves. Before it exists, every conversation is a debate about anecdotes.
What we do about it
A few things we’ve learned are worth saying out loud:
We start with visibility, not vendor changes. You cannot fix what you cannot see, and nobody should reorganize your supply base before the data is on the table — including us.
We optimize incumbents wherever we can. Most companies have suppliers they don’t want touched, for good reasons: speed, service, a relationship that has saved them more than once. One buyer memorably called these “sacred cow vendors.” Fair enough. Better pricing with a supplier you already trust beats a switch you’ll regret.
We’re honest about what’s in scope. Addressable spend is almost always smaller than the total in the AP file. Some categories are locked by contract term, some are genuinely strategic, and some just aren’t worth the disruption. We’d rather scope those out in front of you than quietly count them.
Where to start this week
You don’t need a project to test this. You need one question, answerable from your card statements: how many different suppliers did we pay for the same category last quarter, and how many prices did we pay?
If the answer surprises you, that’s the money nobody was looking at.
ACC finds money in indirect spend nobody was looking at. The evaluation itself carries no fee — Schedule a Call.
